Eastern Abenaki

The Eastern Abenaki are the Algonquian-speaking bands of Maine, above all the Penobscot, and members of the Wabanaki Confederacy. They lived by hunting, fishing and gathering with limited maize planting; when the French settled among them, the Penobscot alone may still have numbered some ten thousand.

Champlain found their planting grounds on the Kennebec in 1604, but kidnappings, fur trade and epidemics soon weakened every band. Allied with the French, they raided the New England frontier through King Philip's War and Queen Anne's War. The conflict named for the missionary Sebastien Rale ended in 1724 with the storming of Norridgewock and his death, after which many survivors withdrew to the Abenaki reserve of Odanak in Quebec.

Penobscot remaining in Maine lost French protection with Quebec's fall in 1759, yet joined the American rebels in the Revolutionary War, by when they numbered under five hundred.